Review of:

Noordegraaf, Jan (2005). Een Kwestie van Tijd: Vakhistorische Studies. Münster: Nodus Publikationen. 192 pp. ISBN. 3-89323-291-5.
 

(November 2005, HSL/SHL 5)

In Een Kwestie van Tijd Noordegraaf presents a wide range of grammatical topics which all have in common the developing historiographical perspective of the authors concerned on the period in question. The writers are presented in a strictly chronological order, from the Enlightenment theorist Adriaan Verwer (1655?-1717) down to the premodern linguist Jac. van Ginneken (1877-1945). As in the case of Van Hemsterhuis tot Stutterheim: Over Wetenschapsgeschiedenis (Noordegraaf 2000), the volume opens with a theoretical introduction, in which the search for precursors is explicitly excluded from the aims of the study in hand. Noordegraaf treats the writers, as far as this is relevant, from biographical, sociological, methodological perspectives, in each case showing their specific characteristics, while at the same time demonstrating the need for an overall theory of linguistic historiography.

About a quarter of the book deals with aspects of the linguistic theory of Lambert ten Kate (1674-1731). In “Amsterdamse kringen. Taalkunde en theologie rond 1700” Adriaan Verwer's religiously inspired reception of the experimental and empirical methodology of Isaac Newton (1642-1727) is presented as a source for Ten Kate's method. Noordegraaf here contrasts the traditionally moderate religious Enlightenment with Jonathan Israel's radical Enlightenment concept, which especially concerns Verwer's Spinoza pamphlet. The underlying question, whether new scientific insights influence theology or are themselves derived from religious convictions, is not posed by the author as such.

Though this is not made explicit, Noordegraaf's views perfectly fit Ten Kate's position in this debate, as is shown in “‘De geboorte en aenwasch der sprake’. Lambert ten Kate over de redelijke mens”. For the key concepts used by Ten Kate in his programme of language civilisation patristic and scriptural sources easily could be found. After Verwer's death Ten Kate increasingly came to represent the moderate religious Enlightenment movement, and Noordegraaf convincingly proves the incorporation of religiously inspired notions in Ten Kate's linguistic theory.

Besides theology and linguistics, aesthetics is the third main subject of Ten Kate's interest. He wrote a French treatise on the sublime which gained him an important place in the history of aesthetics. The English translation of the text by Jacob Christoph le Blon (1677-1741) is reproduced in the present volume. Noordegraaf's suggestion that Ten Kate's introduction to Newton's Opticks enabled Le Blon to invent his four colour printing technique seems plausible, thus providing further evidence for the existence of an Amsterdam-based scientific circle to which besides Ten Kate, Verwer and Le Blon also the young athenaeum professor Tiberias Hemsterhuis (1685-1766) belonged.

Noordegraaf does not treat the very important eighteenth-century reception of Ten Kate's linguistics at the time; instead, he offers interesting evidence for the indirect influence of Ten Kate in South Africa. A.N.E. Changuion (1803-1881), professor at what was to become the University of Cape Town and author of De Nederlandsche Taal in Zuid-Afrika Hersteld (1844) in vain attempted to introduce a norm for written Dutch largely deriving from Ten Kate, but in doing so he nevertheless created the methodological circumstances to make it possible for such a norm to originate from the actually spoken languages of South Africa.

In the period between 1860 and 1945 Dutch linguistics developed its modern form, originally based partly on Saussure's structuralism. Elements of this evolution are explained in the remainder of the articles in the volume under review. The rise of a national from of spoken Dutch both stressed the relevance of dialect linguistics (“‘Eene linguistische kaart van Nederland.’ Rondom de dialectenquête van 1879”) and the need of a semantic theory for this spoken standard Dutch (“Van Eeden, Bolland en Victoria Welby. Significa in het licht van de Rede”). Jac van Ginneken (“Dutch linguists between Humboldt and Saussuere. The case of Jac. van Ginneken (1877-1945)”) somehow functions as a converging point for those ideas and directions. His introduction of the concept of structuralism in field of phonology (phoneme) and later in semantics (lexical field) seems decisive for the sociological direction in which Matthiijs de Vries's (1820-1892) science concept of linguistics developed in the twentieth century.

Noordegraaf's Een Kwestie van Tijd offers a wealth of information and documentation on the subjects treated and possesses everything a volume like this should possess. The author's holistic concept of the period 1700-1945 based on the material analysed seems altogether justified. A subsequent and much needed development of a theory of linguistic historiography from this perspective only can be a matter of time.

Gerrit H. Jongeneelen, Amsterdam (contact the reviewer).